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Thursday, 19 November 2015

This post falls very much into the category of “things I am
not an expert in”. So I tread somewhat wearily. The post reflects on the Athena SWAN process
and it is inspired by my colleague Paul Cairney who wrote this
excellent post reflecting on the process too.

So, today is International Men’s Day, which just loosely
frames this post. And now to immediately go off on a slight tangent, my
colleagues Vikki McCall, Jane Smithson and I are leading on an Athena SWAN
application. Athena SWAN emerged from the Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics (STEM) disciplines as a process to encourage women into these
subject and once they were in, to progress to the highest levels on a par with
their male colleagues. This recognised the long-standing issue that far more
men than women enter these subjects and women tended to drop out before
reaching Professorial level. If you don’t think this should be an issue, I shall
point you in the direction of new Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s comments
on gender equality.

The ECU have broadened Athena SWAN to cover the ASSHBL
(Arts, Social Science, Humanities, Business and Law [I prefer SSHABL myself])
subjects. This makes perfect sense to me – the world’s population is 51% women
and 49% men, if we’re going to increase women’s representation in STEM to 51%
we need to (possibly) increase men’s representation to 49% in the ASSHBL
subjects.

Now, I’m not saying the social sciences are not sexist. I
have heard many horribly stories of everyday sexism from women colleagues in
the social sciences; I have seen horrifically sexist behaviour in seminar or
conferences; I have seen the massive differential expectations on men and women
academics in the social sciences; and I have blogged about the awful macho working hours culture that pervades the social sciences as much as any other
area of academe.

But – and here is where it gets tricky – one of the main
challenges we have found in evidence gathering for our Athena SWAN plan is what
I refer to as the “feminisation” of our subjects: sociology, social policy,
criminology, social work and education, particularly at an undergraduate level.
The term “feminisation” I’ve borrowed from colleagues in Biology where it is
used to describe how their subject, fairly rapidly, changed from being one men
would do to being one women would do. It seems to us that when people are choosing what subjects to study at university, they look at us and think "that's a woman's degree subject".

If we look nationally, 60% of graduates from Scottish universities
are now women. Whereas around three-quarters of the students on our programmes
are women. This is a particular problem in programmes like Primary Education
and Social Work because in broader workforce terms there are long-standing
recognised issues with a lack of men in these professions. Even more concerning
for us, is that there is some evidence (with a million-and-one caveats attached
to it) that these men might not do as well as the women on our programmes – again this
reflects broader societal changes.

The question is, what can we do about this? It seems talking
about it has been a brilliant start actually – there’s been really useful input
from colleagues over the past few months as we’ve been discussing these issues.
One of the better Tweets about International Men’s Day I saw was this one
which links to broader debates about the “crisis of masculinity”. One of our
own undergraduates, off their own back, responded to our data by asking what
the gender breakdown of students accessing student support services was – it was
overwhelmingly women. As touched on in those stats on men’s mental health and suicide,
I ruminated whether we’re in this situation:

Little girls are taught at school to be super-bright, work
really hard and always ask for help. Little boys are taught at school to be
boisterous and self-reliant, and if they have a problem it’s their own. There
might not even be a male role-model around for them to ask for help from. At
university this means women get incredibly stressed and anxious about
assessment, but then ask for help and support and ultimately do very well. Men,
meanwhile, sit back and do nothing and just go with the flow.

There is also the role of assessment methods in here,
although a quick search for this
journal for the term “gender” didn’t inspire me with confidence that I’d
find answers. So, there’s more research and work for my colleagues and I to get
at here. But, if you can suggest things to help us on our way, I would welcome
any comments.

I am to be an assessor for a number of Athena SWAN submissions from ASSHBL departments in the New Year and I'll be really interested to see how they tackle their issue, but also how they tackle the issue I tentatively mentioned above: I think in the ASSHBL subjects, and particularly social science, men very easily presume that because they're left-liberal and feminist they are not sexist, and there is not a greater reflection on culture and behaviour. If Athena SWAN is going to make an impact in the ASSHBL subjects then, as my colleague Prof. Cairney highlights, we will need buy-in from all academic staff and also probably greater culture change than seen in the STEM subjects. /edit: if you want to read something much better about International Men's Day, read First Dog on the Moon's amazing cartoon here.

Friday, 13 November 2015

Today was my essay deadline day for my
large undergraduate module – 296 essays flowing into Turnitin. In the
run-up I was getting the usual emails that can drive you up the wall – this PhD comics. This
year, for the first time, I received three emails asking “was there a minimum
word limit?”; the final one also stated that “people were asking about it on
Facebook”. This frustrated and angered me and I did my first stupid thing which
was to send a very angry Announcement to all the students on the VLE. My second
stupid thing was to tweet
a screenshot of the announcement.

It quickly garnered favorites and retweets and clearly
resonated with a number of academics who follow me who want to do the best for
their students but get frustrated when it appears students are not applying
themselves. At the time of writing it got 13 retweets and 26 favorites. I also
foolishly checked YikYak on campus; more of that later. And, I’ll be honest, as
with all social media, the social confirmation of those RTs and favs felt good.

However, I awoke to an email from one of the students
complaining that the announcement had led them to be publicly embarrassed on
the Facebook page. They then emailed in reply to my apology pointing out I had
also mocked them by tweeting about it. In both respects, they were largely
right. What is frustrating, is from my own research, I should have known they
were right before I did all this.

Nancy Baym and danah boyd talk about the idea of socially
mediated publicness – that is that new technologies have given us myriad
new ways to be “public” and in doing so we have to actually socially mediate
this. While you might post something publicly on Twitter, you may not actually
consider it to be “public” as you doubt it will go further than your immediate
smaller number of followers. If you are more public, this mediation gets
trickier.

I should have been aware of this in two ways. Firstly, I
should have considered that the original Facebook comment from the student was
public and I had not seen it – therefore they could be publicly identified.
Secondly, I should have considered the wider public audience of my tweet and
how individual students concerned would link this public shaming to their own
behaviour. I agree with those who consider tweeting the “hilarious” mistakes
students make in their essays as inappropriate and unethical. In this case I
was unprofessional in my actions.

There’s a broader point here as well, that I think we need
to reflect on as a profession – I know the tweets linking to the blog-post will
get far less attention than the tweet that is the subject of this post. Why is
this? Why do we always think it’s good to be frustrated and angry with
students? Why can’t we focus more on the good and the positive about teaching
students – I had some amazing discussions with students this semester about
their attainment. I should have publicly shared this, not one minor, negative
moment.

In the latest batch of such navel-gazing someone brought up
the horrible case of Professor Stefan Grimm – a lecturer at Imperial College
who committed suicide. The email said something like “And it’s literally
publish or perish” and then a link to an article about his death.

This is not the first time I’ve seen the tragic death of
Prof. Grimm used in this way and as someone who has experienced mental illness
I find it deeply troubling. Effectively, this tragic incident is used to argue
that some management and audit exercises in modern universities are driving people
to their deaths. Effectively, Prof. Grimm is being used as a martyr for
attacks by academics on "management" or "administration".

I find it deeply troubling for two reasons. Firstly, using
Prof. Grimm's suicide in this way – and indeed most of the reporting (including
details of the email he sent to colleagues) – is contrary to advice
provided by The Samaritans on how to publicly discuss suicide. I would
advise readers to note point 3 of this guidance – avoid “over-simplification”:

“Over-simplification of the causes
or perceived ‘triggers’for a suicide can be misleading and
isunlikely to reflect accurately the complexity
of suicide.”

[emphasis in the original guidance online]

We cannot ever
know what was going on in Prof. Grimm’s head when he tragically took his own
life and we should not pretend we do.

Secondly, there is
a touch of hypocrisy too this. Many of the people who make use of Prof. Grimm’s
suicide in this way will happily vilify Britain First at the drop of a hat when
they use the death of Fusilier Lee Rigby to stir up racial hatred. Now, I am in
no way justifying what Britain First do. But if we are going to criticise them
for using this death as a martyrdom to the emotional hurt of his family, then
we should be much more careful what we do ourselves.

So, I implore you.
Think of poor Prof. Grimm’s family, friends and colleagues who will still be dealing with grief the next time you use his tragic death to
vilify the fact you failed to get a grant, or you’re irked you have to publish
four journal articles for the REF. And, please note why The Samaritans have
their guidelines – it is to prevent further suicides:

“Remember that there is arisk of copycat behaviourdue to ‘over-identification’.”

[emphasis in original]We should not be even contemplating suicide as a
way to escape the pressures of a working environment.

Wednesday, 4 November 2015

Playing around with teaching, last year I delivered a lecture without PowerPoint, with an actual written lecture on 'Futures of Social Policy'. I made the essay available to my students and also on here.The feedback on the lack of PowerPoint was interesting - the students who commented said it made them concentrate more in the lecture, but it wasn't very good when they were revising from the recorded lecture on Listen Again(st). The students used the slides as bookmarks in the video to get to exactly the point they wanted to listen to again. I had no idea students even used Listen Again(st) in this way - I thought they just used it when they'd slept-in until 4pm and missed the lecture. So that was useful to know.Anyway, I've done the same again this year - download it and have a look yourself here. It's not journal-submission quality; it's like a #longread blog post really where I pontificate on where we are and what we might be doing. A big shout out to Peter Taylor-Goodby who's excellent paper on the welfare state heavily inspired this lecture, as you'll see. His paper is part of the illustrious company our own paper on Bourdieu and the Big Society keeps in the latest Policy and Politics.I'm also making this lecture a wee bit whizz-bang with some PowerPoint idiocy. You can vote on whether I should broadcast it on Periscope via this tweet.If you like this, then I'm thinking of making SPCU913 an online module over the next two years with most of the material delivered through a WordPress site. So you too can learn my somewhat idiosyncratic take on social policy.

About Me

I'm a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling.
I blog about urban policy, cycling and other ephemera in a semi-professional manner. All posts represent personal opinions.